Saturday, 20 November 2010

soundKonverter failing to convert FLAC to AAC

Looks like something was broken in Kubuntu 10.10 because converting FLACs to AACs seems to have stopped working in soundKonverter. I let Dolphin convert my CDs to FLAC and then use soundKonverter to convert them to AAC for iPod. Last time I did this (not too long ago) everything went smoothly, now soundKonverter just told me the conversion had failed.

After some digging I found out that the log was actually in ~/.kde/share/apps/soundkonverter/log (obviously I first looked in /var/log). The logs told me "Unknown encoder 'libfaac'". The package was there, though.

Googling, I came up with this page. I first tried installing ffmpeg, x264 and libx264-dev by hand, but that didn't help. But following the instructions to the letter did (though I use aptitude instead of apt-get). It's just somewhat annoying having to install packages outside of the package manager.